It may sound like an overstatement, but for artist Joyce Teta it’s really true that creation is a never-ending thrill. Whether she’s creating text as a calligrapher or making handmade books, she’s thrilled by the process, thrilled about the possibilities, even thrilled by the composition of white space. As an artist with decades of experience, Teta radiates the spirit of the newly awakened.

“What’s thrilling about making anything is that when you start working on a piece, it will speak back to you,” the artist says, seated at the worktable in her window-filled studio.

For Teta, the materials themselves are her collaborators. Words, themes, shapes, ink, paper, color — all play an active part in her work. Consider her visual interpretation of the song “Anywhere Is” by the Irish singer/songwriter Enya.

Teta turned the lyrics from “Anywhere Is” into a book because she loves the poetic song and often uses music as a muse.

Enya’s song is a layered swirl of words, chants, and marching rhythms that conveys the often riddlelike answers that can come when asking life’s big questions. Teta used a fourth-century uncial script for the text. Slate blue letters stretch across ivory pages in an elegantly modest style; the text barely undulates, as there was virtually no lowercase and uppercase delineation at that time. In addition, there are no indentations, no paragraphs, nothing but unpunctuated words flowing left to right, pressing up against each margin.

Inside that stream of words, Teta enlarges, darkens, and emphasizes a significant lyric that pops out in the middle of the page; the highlighted words emerge as clear as a message in the midst of mystery.

“The thing that I’m after is ‘What do the words mean?’ ” she explains. “I make you want to come in and think. I make those words look like what they’re saying in terms of designing the book.”

Each page of this book visually pushes forward, creating a propulsion, an inevitability inside the beautiful confusion of letters that seems just right. After all, as one of the highlighted lyrics reads: the turn I have just taken the turn that I was making I might be just beginning I might be near the end.

As a calligrapher, Teta interprets words and considers line breaks and white space as fastidiously as a poet. And perhaps it is that focus that makes her work as a book artist driven by what she calls content. She strives to make her books objects of beauty, yes, but more importantly, she wants her books to contain meaning, to be about something. For Teta, that something usually revolves around openings, the feminine, and the ineffable sacred.

In her book Comma, thick slabs of cedar are cut into 13-by-5-inch pages and bound together. There are no words, only the rough texture of the knotted wood; each page features uneven openings that create a sculptural three-dimensionality. 

“What I love about books is that they’re intimate,” she says. “I want people to hold them, to touch them, to see something in them.”

Teta’s book art reflects her boundless sense of possibility. Bark, fabric, torn pages, and leather are just some of the materials the artist uses to make books, books that often shatter traditional forms by opening like boxes, drawers, curtains, and even treasures.

By using her talent and imagination, her hands, and her heart, Teta turns such daily objects — paper, the alphabet, books — into a wide and fertile field of potential. 

“I love the process,” she says, smiling. “It’s a form of investigation and it is my passion. Art is so hard to define. I just love it, and I love it into being.” 

For more information, go to calligraphycentre.com